Basil's Dream [Paperback]

Christine Hale (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 30, 2009

Fiction. Lucy Langston's marriage is failing when her husband Darrell is suddenly offered a new job as CFO for an American insurance firm in Bermuda. With their twelve-year-old son Peyton, they leave their affluent Connecticut life to start anew in a paradise of pink beaches and quaint British decorum. All too soon, a darker reality emerges, and each of them becomes secretly entangled with Marcus Passjohn--a charismatic opposition leader known for his defense of the island's underclass--and Marcus's alienated son Zef, a budding anarchist. Darrell slips into an intrigue to destroy Passjohn's credibility. Peyton, bullied at school, takes refuge in a frightening delinquency with Zef. And Lucy, seeking to reclaim her son before it's too late, enters a compelling alliance with Marcus Passjohn, one that quickly escalates into a powerfully transforming love affair.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Christine Hale worked in investment banking in New York City in the early 80s, began teaching writing in 1996 and in the intervening years worked part-time as a freelance writer, editor and copy editor in business communications. From 1989 to 1992, as the mother of two small children, she lived in Bermuda. BASIL'S DREAM is her first novel. Her short fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in many journals, including Arts & Letters, Apalachee Review, Natural Bridge, and The Sun. A fellow of the MacDowell, Ucross, Hedgebrook, and Hambidge colonies and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Ms. Hale teaches in the Murray State University Low-Residency MFA Program in Murray, Kentucky. She earned her own MFA in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers in Asheville, N.C.

Product Details

• Paperback: 290 pages
• Publisher: Livingston Press (April 30, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1604890231
• ISBN-13: 978-1604890235
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,364,090 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Complex, passionate dream, June 29, 2009

By 

Ann C. Turkle (Vermont) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Basil's Dream (Paperback)

I expected fine, sensitive writing and found it, but there is much more: tension that made me invest deeply in the outcome of every chapter, complex characters who were impossible to dismiss with a tidy lable, a luscious sense of place and time. I read this novel while traveling and I found I was recalling it as vividly as my real experience.

What a joy to find a novel as difficult and rewarding as real life.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A memorable journey, July 3, 2009

By 

Carol Howard - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Basil's Dream (Hardcover)

Basil's Dream is a stunning novel. Readers will be quickly drawn to the character of Lucy Langston, a woman trying to hold together her troubled marriage and to be a good mother to her teenage son, even as her husband's business firm relocates their white, American family from Connecticut to Bermuda. In Bermuda, Lucy's story becomes truly gripping as her life begins to parallel the life of Marcus Passjohn, the black leader of the Opposition political party who wants to heal his troubled island nation, at the same time that he tries to repair his own relationship with his troubled teenage son. The love story that develops is nearly epic in its scope, as it takes two struggling families into the complex terrain of racial and political struggle in a country that is trying to define its modern identity against a British colonial past.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Vivid, complex, and a great story, July 3, 2009

By 

Julie Wilson - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Basil's Dream (Paperback)

I thoroughly enjoyed Basil's Dream. It's literary fiction, social commentary, love story, and political thriller. This novel reminds me of Russell Banks' Continental Drift and Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible. It's a good story that's hard to put down, and a morally and politically complex story that's hard to forget.

Hale courageously imagines disparate points of view, from the leader of the opposition party who was once black Bermudians' hope for change to the unhappy teen-aged son of a white American couple, bullied in school and unmoored in a new country. The characters are vivid, complex, alive.

Weeks after reading this book, I can still see and hear the characters. I still imagine the landscape of Bermuda. I still recoil from the fires, figurative and literal, that burn through the pages.